An Example of Rubbish Drawing

First off, apologies yet again to Dec for missing the end of Monday and posting this on Tuesday morning. I promise this is the last time, next time I forget my day I'll just take it on the chin and not post at all.

This is an example of something I drew being... not all that great. I drew the original pic a few months back when Dec was up working here, and at the time I'm pretty sure he told me the head looked a tad wonky. 'Nonsense!' I cried. Who are you to tell ME what's well-drawn and what isn't, Marvel-boy?

So a few days later I sent the finished pic on to Thompson just for a second opinion. Body fine, head WONKY. Bah.
By this point I was beginning to feel like perhaps they were onto something. I weirdly couldn't see much wrong with the original head though, I had just sketched it straight out like the rest and inked it up without hesitation; seemed fine to me. So I decided I'd do an alternate version using photo-ref of my own bonce to see if I really had strayed that far from actual human anatomy. Well... yeah. It was wonky.

So the plus side was that I had a better version as a result. The downside is it bore a striking resemblance to myself. Also it looked a tad boring and stiff compared to the looser, original drawing, the eyes in particular. Lifeless eyes, cold eyes. Like a doll's eyes.  So I grabbed the eye-region from my original looser drawing and pasted it straight onto the new more clinical version, and that seemed to do the trick. Suddenly, he had personality again.

I just wish I nailed it right out of my head every time, but then I guess we all do. That's not to say that most times I don't draw perfectly well-crafted heads without ref; I do. I just wanted to show this example of me badly getting it wrong, so that maybe some fans of the blog and wannabe artists can see that there are almost as many failures as successes; it's not all gravy. Sometimes it's just brown and water.